Yellow Journalist: Dispatches from Asian America

Series Foreword

SeriesForeword Darrell Y. Hamamoto As an admirer of his work for many years, I had the opportunity at last to meet Bill Wong at a 1997 conference organized by Professor Ling-chi Wang of the University of California at Berkeley held at the Miyako Hotel in San Francisco’s Japantown. The gathering had been called to ponder the implications of the so-called campaign finance scandal, which involved a host of well-placed Asian and Asian American donors and operatives who had been accused of strategically applying gobs of money where they thought it might be most effective within this system of government by plutocracy. Momentarily suspending discussion of the issues raised by the most recent of periodic “Yellow Peril” moral panics, I asked Wong about a piece (included in the present collection) he recently had written that described his thirteen-year-old son’s spontaneous hail-to-the-chief, President Bill Clinton. The Head Man himself (well before Fellatiogate) had appeared in Wong’s hometown Oakland, California, at a political rally with about fifteen thousand people in attendance. Sam Mende-Wong, representing the Museum of Children’s Art where he worked as a volunteer, seized the moment to exhort the crowd into calling for the president’s reelection. Concluding his rousing cry of support, Sam then turned to the funky tenor sax-playing leader of the free world and gave him the thumbs up, shouting , “Rock on, Mr. President!” Thus did the paternal grandson of an immigrant from Guangdong province named Gee Seow Hong “make his mark” on a world shaped by his tenaciously resilient forebears. As co-editor of the Temple University Press monograph series Mapping Racisms, I floated the idea past Wong that a collection of his essays would be an invaluable resource for those of us who needed a perceptive and xi empathetic intelligence to guide us over the tortuous terrain of contemporary politics, culture, and society. Wong said that he had been thinking along the same lines and I asked him to submit a proposal to produce an anthology of his writing. I left the conference buoyed in anticipation of hearing from the dean of Asian American journalists. But months were to pass with nary a word from Wong. Unlike those of us who have the good fortune of being kept on salary to think deep thoughts, I understood that a working freelance journalist such as he would need to keep producing salable new articles to keep rice on the table. The meticulously tedious job of preparing a manuscript suitable for publication would be onerous even if there were no other demands on his time and resources. Prospects for the project dimmed with the passing days. Many months later, I did a guest shot in a segment on Asian American media depictions broadcast on KQED-FM, the San Francisco public radio station. I took the opportunity to pitch the necessity of an Asian American porno practice to counter attempts by The Man to contain Yellow people politically through the control of our sexuality. Among the listeners was one Bill Wong. Hearing my plans for producing Asian American erotica apparently was enough to rouse our man Wong into action. When I checked for e-mail the next day, a message from Wong awaited me. He had contacted me to inquire whether the offer to do a book still stood. It did. He promised to whip-up a proposal. After sending the proposal and a selection of his articles to a committee of outside reviewers—who voted unanimously in favor of publication—Temple University Press gave the project the green light. The result is the volume of essays before you. In reviewing the passionate, reflective, and sometimes whimsical pieces in this collection, one is struck by how “right” Wong has been on questions that have been fiercely debated and contested by the best and brightest minds in policy circles, academia, and government. Affirmative action, the gender wars, race relations, sexuality, multiculturalism, and contemporary immigration are among the “hot button” issues that have fueled political discussion over the past decade. Wong even has managed to provide fresh perspectives on perennial questions of Asian American “identity,” a topic that too often founders upon clichés, trite observations, and tired formulations. xii Series Foreword Looking back on his writings, why is it that Wong so often has been proven correct in his observations and assessments? For the coherent...